'Round six, question two: Jean Charles de Menezes was shot and killed when mistaken for a 'suicide bomber'." On news reports, shocked passengers in the tube carriage stated the Brazilian man was 'Asian, definitely Asian'. Does this suggest that a) all brown people look the same? or b) there are people in the world who believe Brazil is part of Asia?"

This is not your typical pub quiz question, but then the woman posing it is not your typical quizmaster. Artist Yara el-Sherbini is probably Britain's only Muslim quizmistress. Her quiz nights are the latest in a series of witty, perturbing live-art works which have included her demonstration of how to make a carpet bomb "Blue Peter-style" out of a Persian carpet and a stand-up set of her own transgressive material.

And Sherbini is just one of a new crop of Muslim artists whose confident feminist voices are offering fresh takes on gender politics and Islam. They range from Pakistani miniature painters to experimental performers, but share a uniquely charged position, simultaneously confronting conservative Muslims, western perceptions of Islam as intrinsically misogynist, and the male-dominated western art world itself. (If 2007 Turner prize nominee Zarina Bhimji - a Muslim woman - wins, she will be only the fourth woman to take the prize in its 22-year history).

Although she's a practising Muslim, 28-year-old Slade graduate Sherbini clearly feels at home in the "haram" (non-halal) environs of the pub, dealing deftly with any raucous hecklers as she conducts her quiz from her perch on a bar stool. "Growing up in Pontefract there were only pubs," she explains to me. "In a town with such a tiny ethnic minority population there was no other choice but to socialise in pubs. Anyway, I believe [being a Muslim] is in my actions rather than the pub or place I'm in. For me, it's not about whether you have a glass of wine or not, it's about maintaining good conduct and a good attitude, moral values and ethical beliefs.

"I'm a very active Muslim, in my faith and belief and that's harmonious with my British identity, northern identity and mixed-race identity - it's not conflicting."

Sherbini's mother is from the Caribbean, her father Egyptian and she spent part of her childhood in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. She says she didn't set out to be a Muslim quizmistress: "It's more about playing with this trope of British popular culture, adding a thought-provoking element to the work in a humorous and playful way to get people to engage with the ideas."

In the 2006 group show Who are you? Where are you really from? Sherbini's work was shown alongside that of Faiza Butt. In Butt's brightly-coloured felt-tip pen dot paintings of "utopian impossibilities" everyday people are juxtaposed with unlikely celebrity counterparts: a girl in hijab cheerfully embracing Elton John and Eminem; an Asian girl in winter woollies lined up alongside midriff-baring Madonna and a brazen Britney.

"They seem to inspire a love-it-or-hate-it reaction," says Butt, 33, in a gentle Pakistani accent. "Some find them too explicit, others find them humorous and entertaining. By creating these situations, these utopian impossibilities in which two genders or races or classes which don't normally coexist appear, you raise the question, 'Why not?'"

Butt left her native Lahore in 1999 to take up her masters at Slade, and subsequently taught there after marrying an Englishman and settling in north London. Many of the characters in her work pay homage to the second-generation British Asian students who Butt went on to teach at an inner-London sixth-form college.

In reference to the Madonna and Britney painting, Butt points out that "it's assumed the kind of sexual liberty these showbiz women represent is in opposition to the [modest] Asian girl I've slipped in between them". In real life, the girl, who wore a headscarf, was a big Britney fan and performed a stunning rendition of Hit Me Baby One More Time at the college talent show. "The main reason for making this piece was to say we shouldn't hold on to preconceptions about each other's backgrounds," she says.

Having come from a staunchly feminist background in Pakistan, where she was involved in protests against Sharia law, Butt was surprised by how conservative some of her British Muslim art students were. Many of them objected to figurative art-making because they considered depicting the human form idolatrous and un-Islamic. "In the end I did win trust because I was not trying to provoke them to make radical work and take their scarves off. My approach was more 'Keep your scarves on, but try to question things more than you have done as you move into adulthood.'"

A contemporary of Butt's, Aisha Khalid, is one of the biggest names in the new miniaturist movement that originated in Lahore - where she and Butt both trained at the National College of Art - fusing the rigorously learned techniques of Mughal court painters with contemporary art practices.

Khalid grew up in the small town of Shikarpur, where her sister wore a burqa from an early age and she herself went to school wrapped in a shawl to protect her modesty. The critic Virginia Whiles writes of the heavily veiled women who appear in Khalid's miniatures, "They stand invisible yet resolute in their burqas ... Khalid's work distils a dual sense of oppression and subversion."

American imperial aggression towards Muslim states is a recurring theme for Khalid. Infinite Justice, shown last year at Manchester Art Gallery, is a tantalising sea of cotton threads seemingly suspended in midair - but actually concealing hundreds of sharp needles. A black target emerges in the middle of the soft cloud, a reminder of the title of this series, which was made in the immediate aftermath of September 11.

Anita Dawood, co-founder of London-based arts organisation Green Cardamom, which represents many of the new miniaturists, says that Khalid is in a uniquely powerful position "as one of the first artists to have a career in the west without having to leave Pakistan". This is partly due to the boom in the Indian economy and art market and partly due to Khalid's fierce commitment to staying artistically rooted in her country of origin.

"We are living in Pakistan," Khalid tells me, "and there are lots of issues there and in Afghanistan and Iran which I can't just ignore. I start the day with the newspaper and read every little article. My work is a mixture of very personal and political things, not one or the other."

Khalid has a solo show next spring at the Pump House Gallery in Battersea Park, south London, and the centrepiece of her most recent joint show (she exhibits with her artist husband, Imran Qureshi) will sell for over £30,000. But she has not always found the western art market so receptive. In fact, during a two-year residency at the Rijks Academy in Amsterdam, tutors suggested her work was too explicitly political (but only when it was critical of European cultural norms). Furthermore, they were concerned by her habit of sitting on the floor engaged in suspiciously feminised, craft-making activities such as embroidery. She turned the ideological clash into art, making a video installation - Conversation - a deceptively simple film of her hand-embroidering a flower and another "foreign" hand simultaneously unpicking it.

Their artistic approaches couldn't be more different, but Sherbini, Khalid and Butt are all tussling with constricting models of femininity and of Islam. Sherbini insists that self-interrogating Muslim women like herself are more common than people think. "I'm not unique," she says. "We exist but we don't have the visibility"· Yara el-Sherbini will host her next pub quiz on August 31 at Westow House pub at the launch of the Crystal Palace artists annual art fair.